Safe Harbor Statement: The information on IBM products is intended to outline IBM's general product direction and it should not be relied on in making a purchasing decision. The information on the new products is for informational purposes only and may not be incorporated into any contract. The information on IBM products is not a commitment, promise, or legal obligation to deliver any material, code, or functionality. The development, release, and timing of any features or functionality described for IBM products remains at IBM's sole discretion.

Tony Pearson is a an active participant in local, regional, and industry-specific interests, and does not receive any special payments to mention them on this blog.

Tony Pearson receives part of the revenue proceeds from sales of books he has authored listed in the side panel.

Tony Pearson is not a medical doctor, and this blog does not reference any IBM product or service that is intended for use in the diagnosis, treatment, cure, prevention or monitoring of a disease or medical condition, unless otherwise specified on individual posts.

Inside System Storage -- by Tony Pearson

Tony Pearson is a Master Inventor and Senior Software Engineer for the IBM Storage product line at the
IBM Executive Briefing Center in Tucson Arizona, and featured contributor
to IBM's developerWorks. In 2016, Tony celebrates his 30th year anniversary with IBM Storage. He is
author of the Inside System Storage series of books. This blog is for the open exchange of ideas relating to storage and storage networking hardware, software and services. You can also follow him on Twitter @az990tony.
(Short URL for this blog: ibm.co/Pearson
)

Continuing my blog coverage of the [Forrester IT Forum 2009 conference],I finally catch up with some keynote sessions this morning. Here's my recap on the rest of the main tent general session keynote presentations from BP, Microsoft and CFIL.

Dana presented "The gift we’ve been given – reinventing the IT organization". He is the CIO of BP, an energy company that made over 360 billion dollars selling oil and gas. In fact, it is the fourth largest company in the world, with 92,000 employees in more than 100 countries. Back in 2007, business was good but the senior management team felt that IT needed to be straightened out.Dana was brought in as a "fresh thinking" outsider, managing a group 4000 IT staff composed mostly of contractors, dealing with more than 2000 IT suppliers and more than 60 versions of SAP.

Dana presented the results of their IT makeover. In the first year, he was able to cut out 400 million US dollars from the IT budget, including the reduction of 500 people from the IT staff. He increased the employee/contractor ratio to 40/60, with plans to bring this up to 65/35 over the next year. He was able to get 1800 IT employees to perform a self-assessment to understand their strengths and weaknesses. He was able to centralize the IT leadership team, and deploy a common [ITIL] best practices implementation.

What did he learn from all this? Here were his top four "lessons learned":

No time to dwell but know your facts

Work in parallel to push the pace of change

Listen but in the end take your own counsel

Tell a compelling story to energize your employees and your leadership

Chris presented "Uncovering Value in the Cloud and On Your Desktop", onhow Microsoft customers are taking advantage of the software they have already purchased.For example, Jamba Juice was able to use Microsoft SharePoint to cut down locating documents from 15 minutes to just seconds, reducing 10-15 hours per week for more than 500 managers. More importantly, they were more confident that document they found was the right one. This is often referred to as "one version of the truth." In another example, Tyson Foods was able to connect Microsoft Word to their SAP application, and have that then connect to their Microsoft SharePoint.

Chris was amazed that many Microsoft customers don't take advantage of all that is available to them.He gave four examples:

Planning Services: If you buy an enterprise license to Microsoft products, you get planning services, from either Microsoft's own Microsoft Consulting Services or from thousands of Microsoft Business Partners. Only 8 percent of customers take advantage of this.

Home Use Rights: For enterprise license customers, employees can purchase "home use rights" to use the Enterprise level of Microsoft Office software for only 10 US dollars, but only about 3 percent take advantage of this.

Training: Many enterprise licenses come with 2-4 weeks of training vouchers, but only 40 percent take advantage of these vouchers.

E-Learning: Microsoft also offers e-learning, which Microsoft customers can either have delivered from Microsoft's own hosted services, or they can get a copy of the E-learning materials hosted inside their own company firewall. Again, few take advantage of this.

Chris wrapped up his presentation by citing some examples of customers that migrated from in-house, on-premises collaboration software to Microsoft's "Exchange Online" and "SharePoint Online" cloud computing Software-as-a-Service [SaaS] offerings. The cloud versions of these software do not offer all the features as the on-premise versions, but Microsoft is working to close this gap.

(IBM offers similar cloud computing services for email and collaboration called [LotusLive])

Gary presented "Tough Times: Opportunity for Innovation and Corporate Makeover". He had some greatquotes intended to help people become better leaders, like this:

“Leadership failures do not usuallyresult from leaders not knowing what todo; rather these failures result becauseleaders fail to do what they know fullwell they should and must do.Most leaders never get fully comfortable withthe changes that they wish for theirorganizations.”

His recommendations:

Change the Conversation - employees want to have a compelling reason to change.

Create a compelling description of the future - employees want a vision of where they are headed.

Emotionally enlist employees in the cause - leaders are not remembered for their attributes, as much as the causes they stood for.

Help me understand the business - employees often do not have information in context to act accordingly.

Choose passionate - employees want to see leaders that are passionate and confident on the process and strategic direction.

Create a To-Stop list - we all have "to do" lists, but perhaps you need a "to don't" list. In other words, a list of bad habits and practices you need to discontinue.

Gary indicated that trust must be given before it is earned. If a leader doesn't trust the employees, how do you expect the employees to trust the leader? When asking employees to change their behavior, or self-assess their own skills, a leader must emphasize "I mean you no harm." Otherwise,mistrust will undermine the intended results.

The keynote sessions the past three days have provided clear motivation to the CIOs and IT leaders in the audience to consider making the necessary changes, with impressive results and actionable advice.

Well, I am back from Las Vegas, and had a pleasant [US Memorial Day] holiday yesterday.

Today is Tuesday, and that means more IBM announcements! IBM announced that the DCS9900 now supports an intermix of SAS and SATA drives. The DCS9900 is purpose-built specifically for the High-Performance-Computing (HPC) and Video Broadcasting industries.

The system is a combination of 4U controllers and 3U expansion drawers. The controllers handle either FC or Infiniband attachment to host servers. The expansion drawers hold up to 60 drives each. With the new features of intermix, the following drives are supported:

7200 RPM SATA drives in 500, 750 and 1000 GB capacities

15K RPM SAS drives in 146, 300 and 450 GB capacities

The DCS9900 groups the drives into sets of 10, in RAID-6 ranks of 8+2P. IBM supports either 5, 10 or 20 expansion drawers to make a complete system. The maximum configuration would be 1200 drives of the 1000GB SATA drives, for a total of 1.2 PB in two frames. Each rank must be all the same type and capacity drive, but you can mix different types within the entire system.

The DCS9900 supports "Sleep Mode", an implementation of Massive Array of Idle Disks [MAID] technology, whereby each RAID rank can be either awake and spinning, or in energy-efficient standby mode. This makes for a more "green" storage system for data that is not accessed frequently.

As an IBM consultant, I deal with all of these different kinds of professionals, so I thought I would try to attend a variety of sessions this week. Here are my notes from a few of these:

Transforming IT for Lean Times: Organizational Structure

The Forrester analyst presented the concept of "Lean IT". This is not just a process to make IT skinny or marginal through commoditization. Rather, it is to meet business needs through differentiated services. Gone is the "one-size fits all" mentality. Lean IT can be used to streamline IT capabilities to enable employees to get their jobs done. Continuous improvement is done through a series of "Rapid Improvement Events" (RIE), a methodology known as "Kaizen Blitz".The focus is to reduce waste, including rework, firefighting, meetings, unnecessary reports and paperwork, working groups, and task forces. A common mistake is to reorganize departments before understanding the fundamental requirements, or make every employee use the same PC just to simplify the job of IT.

Traditionally, IT departments had three jobs. The first is Utility, to keep the lights on and systems running. The second is Productivity, to enhance existing systems and applications. The third is Innovation and Business Transformation.The problem has been that many IT leaders have been "IT Supply Managers" ensuring there is adequate supply of these. Instead, the Forrester analyst suggests redefining the role to one of "Demand Broker". Some companies have already done this. The CIO manages the demand for IT from Business Units, Business Processes, Information Workers, as well as suppliers, business partners and customers. As a demand broker, the CIO could then use these demands to optimize and prioritize IT resources.

Why Tech will lead Economic Recovery

The current 5.7 percent drop in IT spending in 2009 during this global financial meltdown is actually similar to the drop in ITspending in 2001-2003. However, the Forrester analyst anticipates that IT spending will bounce back in 2010.His reasoning came from looking at past IT spending trends since the 1950s. He found four clear sequencesconsisting of 6-10 years of growth and investment in IT, followed by 6-10 years of refinement and digestionwhere business leaders try to make the most use of these investments. The four sequences of investment and growth are:

2008-2016 smart computing, optimizing business results through flexible and responsive IT that incorporates awareness and analytics to solve new business problems.

He argued that this trend was already starting to show itself. There was an uptick in IT spending in 2008 before the financial melt-down, and he feels this is why the tech industry sector will drive the economic recovery in 2010. The top five industries that will lead the adoption of smart computing will be: Government, Healthcare and Life Sciences, Utilities, Education, and Personal Services. These represent 54 percent of IT spending in the US, and also represent a large portion of the US stimulus package.

Smart computing in these industries reflects the need for more vertically-aligned industry-specific solutions.IBM is well-positioned in this area, having both the hardware, software and services for smart computing, as well as deep industry-specific expertise. Other industry-specific vendors, like General Electric and Siemens, have the vertical alignment, and are working to adopt smart computing. Meanwhile, Oracle/Sun and Microsoft are also investing in smart computing, and have the potential to develop more vertically-aligned industry-specific solutions. Other IT vendors will have a choice to make: stay horizontal or go vertical.

the average ERP deployment 10 years old, triggering many to re-evaluate how

well the promises of ERP match the reality. On the positive side, ERP promised to reduce the total number of applications, provide somefinancial stability and integration, and for the most part the Forresteranalyst felt these promises were mostly met. However, in deploying newcapabilities, lowering TCO or establishing a partnership between vendorand client, ERP vendors got low marks.

Customers are now demanding more end-to-end solutions, especially withmore industry-specific functionality. Technologyadvances should be used to boost the business value. For example,ERP lags in SaaS adoption. Frequent upgrades to meet regulatory requirementscould drive stronger interest in SaaS deployments of ERP.

Customers would also like the end-user experience with the ERP to bemore role-based, with actionable insight and intelligent responses related to the user's job responsibilities. Hybrid ERP solutions that span deploymentacross on-premises, SaaS and managed hosting services might be neededto ease this transition.

What You Should Know Before Signing a Contract with a Disaster Recovery Services provider

This session was less about RTO or RPO, and more about broader considerations.The leading disaster recovery service providers are IBM Business Continuityand Resiliency Services [BCRS], SunGard, ICM/UK, and HP. The Forrester analyst did not think HP was treating this as strategically as they could,and often are behind the scenes through other business partners.

Will this [oligopoly] continue? Theanalyst thinks there will be an increase in the number of disaster recovery service providers. Contenders includeTelcos like Qwest, AT&T, BT, and Verizon Business; SMB-focused firms like i365 and Venyu;and cloud computing IaaS providers like SAVVIS.

So what should you consider when putting out an RFP? Here were a few suggestions:

Make sure there are schedules for all of your platforms (x86, Unix, System i and System z)

Identify all fees, including "declaration fee" and "occupancy fee"

Costs of Disaster Recovery test exercises, including how many, and their duration in days.

How quickly you can access their facility after you declare the disaster

Whether the provider has alternative Data Centers, depending on the scope of the regional disaster

Evolving the 4 P's of Marketing to Grow Revenue in Emerging Markets

I was in IBM marketing for seven years. For those without marketing backgrounds, the 4 P's of marketing are product, promotion, placement and pricing. There is no "global" audience, eachcountry, region or locale has unique characteristics, and requires go-to-market (GTM) strategiesbe tailored to each situation. For example, in Russia, decision makers are more influenced byWeb sites and Industry magazines; in Europe, they are more influenced by peers and word-of-mouth;and in Latin America, direct sales force are most influential. In many countries, blogs are more influential than they are in the United States.

Companies of all sizes can do the right things. For example, IBM translates its materials into 31different languages. Meanwhile, 50-person [LogMeIn] has 17 million users because they have localized their offering, and even allow online purchase in local currencies. Third party consultants that knowthe local region may be needed to break into new geographies.

Certainly the opportunity is there. Worldwide, there are an estimated 9 million small businesses,and another 630,000 medium size businesses. These SMBs employ 22 percent of the workforce in Russia, 55 percentin Europe, and 80 percent in Japan.To reach them, you may need to explore new channels,such as government agencies, academia, non-government organizations (NGO), and trade associations.The traditional supply chain of vendor, distributor and reseller may need be redefined as a demandnetwork, with co-marketing programs, peer-to-peer relationships and shared knowledge resources.

IBM collaborated with the International Finance Corporation [IFC] tocreate the [SME Toolkit], a resource and online communityfor small and medium enterprises, translated and localized into several languages. IBM also workedwith Chinese government to select Wuxi, China as the location for its Cloud Computing center as partof the [Wuxi Tai Hu New Town Science and Education Industrial Park].

Continuing my blog coverage of the [Forrester IT Forum 2009 conference],I will group a bunch of topics related to Cloud Computing into one post. Cloud Computing was a big topichere at the IT Forum, and probably was also in the other two conferences IBM participated in this week inLas Vegas:

The CIOs and IT professionals at this Forrester IT Forum seemed to be IT decision makers with a broader view. There was a lot of interest in Cloud Computing. What is Cloud Computing? Basically, it is renting IT capability on an as-needed basis from a computing service provider. The different levels of cloud computing depends on what the computing service provider actually provides. How do these compare with traditional co-location facilities or your own in-house on-premises computing? Here's my handy-dandy quick-reference guide:

Traditional On-Premises, what most people do today, build or buy your own data center, buy the hardware, write or buy the software, then install and manage it.

No

No

No

No

No

A main tent session had a moderated Q&A panel of three Forrester Analysts titled "Saving, Making and Risking Cash with Cloud Computing." Here are some key points from this panel:

Is Cloud Computing just another tool in the IT toolbox, or does it represent a revolution? The panel gave arguments for both. As a set of technology, protocols and standards, it is an evolutionary progression of other standards already in place, and an extension of methods used in co-location and time-share facilities. However,from a business model perspective, Cloud Computing represents a revolutionary trend, eliminating in some cases huge up-front capital expenses and/or long-term outsourcing contracts. PaaS and IaaS offerings can be rented by the hour, for example.

An example of using Cloud Computing for a one-time batch job: The New York Times decided to build an archive of 11 million articles, but this meant having to convert them all from TIFF to PDF format. The IT person they put in charge of this rented 100 machines on [Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)] for 24 hours and was able to convert all 4TB of data for only $240 US dollars.

Cloud Computing can make it easier for companies to share information with clients, suppliers and business partners, eliminating the need to punch holes through firewalls to provide access.

Since it is relatively cheap for companies to try out different cloud computing offerings with little or no capital investment, the spaghetti model applies--"throw it on the wall, and see what sticks!"

Different IT roles will see varying benefits and risks with cloud computing. However, by 2011, every new IT project must answer the question "Why not run in the cloud?"

There were a variety of track sessions that explored different aspects of cloud computing:

Software-as-a-Server: When and Why

This session had three Forrester analysts in a Q&A panel format. SaaS can provide much-needed relief from application support, maintenance and upgrade chores. The choice and depth of offerings is improving from SaaS providers. However, when comparing TCO between SaaS and on-premises deployments, can yield different results for different use cases. For example, a typical SaaS rate of $100 US dollars per user per month, with discounts, could be $1000 per year, or $10,000 over a 10-year period. Compare that to the total 10-year costs of an on-premises deployment, and you have a good ball-park comparison. SaaS can provide faster time-to-value, and you can easily just try-before-you-buy several alternative offerings before making a decision.

The downside to SaaS is that you need to understand their data center, where it is located, and how it is protected for backup and disaster recovery. Some SaaS providers have only a single data center, so it mightbe disruptive if it experiences a regional disaster.

Cloud IT Services: The Next Big Thing or Just Marketing Vapor?

Economic pressures are forcing companies to explore alternatives, and Cloud IT services are providingadditional options over traditional outsourcing. Only 70-80 percent of companies are satisfied with traditionaloutsourcing, so there is opportunity for Cloud IT services to address those not satisfied. Scalable, consumption-based billing with Web-based accessibility and flexibility is an attractive proposition. Tenyears ago, you could not buy an hour on a mainframe with your credit card, now you can.

Cloud technologies are mature, and there is interest in using these services. About 10 percent of companies are piloting SaaS offerings, 16 percent piloting PaaS offerings, and 13 percent investing in deploying "private clouds" within their data center. This week Aneesh Chopra, who is Barack Obama's pick as the first CTO for the US Federal Government, [stated to congressional leaders]: “The federal government should be exploring greater use of cloud computing where appropriate.”

IBM is betting heavily on their Cloud Computing strategy, has already gone through the reorganizations needed to be positioned well, and claims to have thousands of clients already. HP has some cloud offerings focused on their enterprise customers. Dell is investing and reorganizing for cloud as well.

Network Strategic Planning for Challenging Times

While not limited to Cloud Computing, companies are seeing WAN traffic doubling every 18 months, but withoutthe corresponding increases in budget to cover it. The Forrester analyst covered WAN optimization management services, hybrid Ethernet-MPLS offerings to help people transition from MPLS VPNs to Carrier-grade Ethernet.

Who should you hire for WAN optimization? Do you trust your own Telco that provides your bandwidth to help you figure out ways to use less of it? Alternatives include System Integrators and Service providers like IBM and EDS.Or, you could try to do it yourself, but this requires capital investment in gear and performance monitoring software.

New workloads like Voice over IP (VoIP) and digital surveillance can help cost-justify upgrading your MPLS VPNs to Carrier-grade Ethernet. The possibility of converging this with iSCSI and/or Fibre Channel (FC) over Ethernet (FCoE) and this can help reduce costs as well. Both MPLS and Ethernet will co-exist for awhile, and hybrid offerings from Telcos will help ease the transition. In the meantime, switching some workloads to Cloud Computing can provide immediate relief to in-house networks now. Converging voice, video, LAN, WAN and SAN traffic may require the IT departments to reorganize how the IT role of "network administrator" is handled.

Navigating the Myriad New Sourcing Models

The landscape of outsourcing has changed with the introducing of new Cloud Computing offerings. However, adapting these new offerings to internal preferences may prove challenging. The Forrester analyst suggesting being ready to try to influence their companies to adopt Cloud Computing as a new sourcing option.

Traditional outsourcing just manages your existing hardware and software, often referred to as "Your mess for less!" However, outsourcing contract law is mature and many outsource providers are large, well-established providers. In contrast, some SaaS providers are small, and the few that are largemay be fairly new to the outsourcing business. Here are some things to consider:

Where will the data physically be located? There are government regulations, such as the US Patriot Act, that can influence this decision.Many Canadian and European customers are avoiding providers where datais stored in the United States for this reason.

What is the service delivery chain? Some cloud providers in turn useother cloud providers. For example a SaaS provider might develop the software and then rent the platform it runs on from a PaaS, which in turn mightbe using offshore or co-location facilities to actually house their equipment.Knowing the service delivery chain may prove important on contractnegotiations. Clarify "cloud" terminology and avoid mixed metaphors.

What is their contingency plan? What is your contingency plan if the system is slow or inaccessible. What is their plan to protect against data loss during disasters? What if they go out of business? Source Code Escrow has proven impractical in many cases. SLAs should provide for performance, availability and other key metrics. However, service level penalties are not a cure-all for major disruptions, loss of revenues or reputation.

How will they handle security, compliance and audits? Heavy regulatory requirements may favor dedicated resources to be used.

Who has "custodianship" of the data? Will you get the data back if you discontinue the contract? If so, what format will it be in, and will it make any sense if you are not running the same application as the cloud provider?

Will they provide transition assistance? Moving from on-premises to cloud may involve some effort, including re-training of end users.

Are the resources shared or dedicated? For shared resource environments, is the capacity "fenced off" in any way to prevent having other clients impact your performance or availability.

I am glad to see so much interest in Cloud Computing. To learn more, here is IBM's [Cloud Computing] landing page.

A Forrester Analyst drew the analogy of a river to the upcoming onslaught of millennials. Some 100 years ago, smart companies positioned themselves near rivers, the water provided power as well as a means of transporting products. However, today, being positioned near a river doesn't ensure company success, and there are plenty of examples of companies that have existed a long time now filing for bankruptcy.

As we get out of this recession, the war for people will be intense. In the United States, as many as 76 million[Baby Boomers], born between 1946 and 1964, are retiring or approaching retirement, being replaced by 46 million [Gen X], born between 1965 and 1976. By 2010, there will be as many as 31 million [Millenials], born between 1977 and 1998, in the workforce.

To drive the point home, the Forrester analyst cited [Whirlpool] as an example, a company more than 100 years old, with 73,000 employees across 170 countries. Whirlpool manufactures kitchen, laundry and other home appliances. From 1997 to 2002, however, Whirlpool's per-ticket sales were dropping at a rate of 3.4 percent per year. To reverse this trend, they established the Whirlpool Young Professional program, assigned I-mentors, and invested in Web 2.0 collaboration tools. They realized that they needed to harness the Gen X and Millenial energy. The result?From 2002 to 2006, they had a compete turn-around, with per-ticket sales growing 5.9 percent per year.

Since I covered IBM's keynote session yesterday, I thought it would only be fair to cover HP's today.IBM and HP are the top two IT vendors in the world, and not surprisingly also the top two IT storage vendors, and are both platinum sponsors for this event.

Phil presented "Enabling Innovation: A Strength In Any Economy", which covered HP's approach to innovationnot just within HP itself, but also to help their customers. He presented an interesting progression forIT. In the first, IT is very technology-centric, focusing on standardizing platforms and automating tasks.In the second, IT is more process-oriented, standardizing and automating business processes measured for reliable IT outcomes. In the third, IT is business-aligned, standardizing and automating services, measured on business results. He argued that the challenge was for companies to transform their IT through this progression to improve business impact.

To help customers, HP focuses on four aspects of an Innovation Management Framework:

Strategy, Measurement and Metrics

Systems, Collaboration tools and knowledge management

Culture, Education and Training

Ecosystem, business partnerships and customer innovation

He wrapped up his talk reminding us that ideas without execution are just hobbies.

Tom Peck, Senior VP and CIO, Levi Strauss & Co

Levi Strauss & Co. manufactures denim pants and other clothing apparel, and has been doing so for more than 150 years. Tom made a point to actually wear denim jeans and a sports coat on stage for his talk.His presentation "Dealing with Disruption" was not about disruptive technologies, but rather the disruption the economic downturn has impact the retail industry. To survive through this recession, IT leaders needto be bold about their hiring, reorganizing and rethinking of IT because disruption is everywhere.

IT is not a cost center at Levi Strauss, and represents only 3.5 percent of their total expenses. Instead, they have educated their stakeholders that IT is an investment for competitive advantage. They have focused on simplifying, which is important because their line of pants has grown incredibly complex. When you factor in the different fabrics, colors, styles, sizes, fit and finish, you end up with a large numberof different pants. This complexity came from an effort to provide exactly what every customer thought they needed. He cited a great quote:

“If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”--- Henry Ford

This same complexity occurs in IT. To address the changes needed, Tom combined "Lean IT" principles with "Six Sigma" methodologies. Lean IT helped identify problems with the overall flow of processes and provided the tools to remove steps that did not add value. Six Sigma was applied to the remaining steps that did add value, to improve capability and effectiveness.

Companies that have been around for awhile, like IBM, Whirlpool and Levi Strauss & Co., have learned to adapt to the changing business and IT landscape, and adopt new ideas for new ways of doing things.

Bob Moffat, IBM Senior VP and Group Executive who leads IBM's world-renown Systems and Technology Group, and Cris Espinosa, System x and BladeCenter platform sales specialist, one of the many employees like me at the bottom of same Systems and Technology Group.

Here'sBob Moffatholding an IBM BladeCenter HS22 blade server.A lot of the IBM executives were on hand to help show off IBM's strategy and vision, and highlight how to deploy IBM systems that are the right fit for today.

This is Ira Chavis, IBM consulting IT specialist, who covers how to manage and reduce energy usage today withIBM Energy Efficiency offerings.

These are IBM servers pre-installed with IBM Tivoli software to help monitor applications and provide service desk support. These are part of our IBM Express initiative that focus solutions aimed for medium sized businesses. By offering them as appliances, rather than just software, these can be deployed in only an hour in most situations.

And here I am, Tony Pearson, IBM certified Dynamic Infrastructure solutions expert, covering servers, storage and networking systems that help to improve service, reduce costs and manage risk. IBM offers flexible systems, software and services to match a wide diversity of business needs, designed for today's challenges and tomorrow's opportunities.

Forrester analysts kicked off the keynote sessions for Day 1 of the Forrester IT Forum 2009 event. The theme for this conference is "Redefining IT's value to the Enterprise."Rather than focusing on blue-sky futures that are decades away, Forrester wants to present instead a blend of pragmatic informationthat is actionable now in the next 90 days along with some forward-looking trends.

If you ask CEOs how well their IT operations are doing, 75 percent will saythey are doing great. However, if you dig down, and ask how their companies are leveraging IT to help generate revenues, reduce costs, improve employee morale, drive profits, improve customer service, or manage risks, then the percentage drops down to 30 to 35 percent.

What are the root causes of this "perception gap" in value between business and IT? Several ideas come to mind:

Some CEOs still consider IT departments as "cost centers". Rather than exploiting technology to help drive the rest of the business, they are seen as a necessary evil, an extension of the accounting department, for example.

Some CEOs consider IT's role as basically "keeping the lights on". They only notice IT when the lights go out, or other business outages caused by disruptions in IT.

IT departments measure themselves in technology terms, not business terms. CEOs and the rest of the senior management team may not be "tech savvy", and the CIO and IT directors may not be "business savvy", resulting in failure to communicate IT's role and value to the rest of the business.

This conference is focused on CIOs and IT professionals, and how they can bridge the tech/business gap. The first two executive keynote presentations emphasized this point.

Bob Moffat, Senior VP and Group Executive, IBM

Bob Moffat (my fifth-line manager, or if you prefer, my boss's boss's boss's boss's boss) is the Senior VP and Group Executive of IBM's Systems and Technology Group that manufactures storage and other hardware. He presented how IBM is helping our clients deploy smarter solutions. Globalization has changed world business markets, has changed the reach of information technology, and has changed our client's needs.To support that, IBM is focused on making the world a smarter planet, instrumented with appropriate sensors, interconnected over converging networks, and intelligent to provide visibility, control and automation.

It's time to rethink IT in light of these new developments, to think about IT in client terms, with business metrics. Bob gave several internal and customer examples, here's one from the City of Stockholm:

Covering nine square miles of Stockholm Sweden, IBM led [the largest project of its kind] for traffic congestion in Europe. To reduce congestion caused by 300,000 vehicles, the City of Stockhold enacted a "congestion fee" with real-time recognition of license plates and a Web infrastructure to collect payments. The analytics, metrics and incentives have paid off. Since August 2007, traffic is reduced 18 percent, a reduction of travel time on inner streets, and a 9 percent increase in "green" vehicles.

Dave Barnes must act as the "trusted advisor" to the rest of the senior management team. UPS delivers packages worldwide. They put sensors on all of the vehicles, not just to know how fast they were driving,but also how often they drove in reverse gear, and sensors on the engines to determine maintenance schedules.Analytics found that driving in reverse was the most dangerous, and by providing this information to the drivers themselves, the drivers were able to come up with their own innovative ways to minimize accidents.This is one role of IT, to provide employees the information they need to enable them to be better at their own jobs.

Dave also mentioned the importance of collaborating across business units. Their "Information Technology Steering Committee (ITSC)" has 15 members, of which only three are from the IT department. This helped deploy social media initiatives within UPS. For example, Twitter has been adopted so that senior management can get unfiltered customer feedback. This is perhaps another key role of IT, to flatten an organization from cultural hierarchies that prevent top brass up in the ivory tower from hearing what is going wrong down on the street. Too often, a customer or client complains to the nearest employee, and this may or may not get passed up accurately along the chain of command. Twitter allowed executives to see what was going on for themselves.

Dave also covered the "Best Neighbor" approach. If you were going to build a deck in your back yard, you might ask your neighbors that have already done this, and learn from their experience. Sadly, this does not happen enough in IT. To address this, UPS has a "Tech Governance Group" that focused on business process across the organization. For example, they improved "package flow", reducing 100 million miles in the past few years.

Lastly, he mentioned that many technologists are "loners". They have a few like that, but try to hire techies who look to team across business units instead. Likewise, they try to hire business people who are somewhat tech savvy. For example, they have encouraged business employees to write their own reports, rather than requesting new reports to be developed by the IT department. The end result, the business people get exactly the reports they want, faster than waiting for IT to do it. Another role for IT is to provide end-users the tools to make their own reports.

(Dave didn't mention what tools these were, but it sounded like the Business Intelligence and Reporting Tools [BIRT] that IBM uses.)

These two sessions were a great one-two punch to the audience of 600 CIOs and IT professionals. First, IBM sets the groundwork for what needs to be done. Then, UPS shows how they did exactly that, adopting a dynamic infrastructure and got great results. This is going to be an interesting week!

Well, I have arrived safely in Las Vegas, and the [Forrester IT Forum 2009 conference] started today at noon, with a Welcome Reception at the Technology Showcase. As a platinum sponsor, IBM has a booth manned by several subject matter experts, on the fourth floor of the Sands Expo, between the Venetian and Palazzo hotels.

On the left side, we have Paula Koziol and our [Kaon Interactive] 3D touch-screen.

On the right side, we have Ira Chavis and Cris Espinosa, and a rack of some of IBM's latest offerings.

I'm here all week to blog about this event. When I am not in sessions, I will probably hang out at the Technology Showcase with my colleagues above. If you are in Las Vegas, and want to connect, please contact me.

Steve Loeschorn presented the latest on IBM System x and BladeCenter offerings. Steve showed how IBM'sSystem x servers were more energy efficient than x86 servers from HP and Dell.

Michael Middleton presented the latest from IBM POWER® systems. Michael had some interesting statisticsthat showed IBM's AIX operating system to be more reliable than Sun Solaris, HP-UX, andMicrosoft Windows. Based on a study of 400 companies, AIX averaged only 36 minutes of downtime per year.

Oh – and for the record TonyP, I don't think I ever said EMC was using a newer or different EFDs than IBM. I just asserted that EMC knows more than IBM about these EFDs and how they actually work a storage array under real-world workloads.

(Here "EFD" is refers to "Enterprise Flash Drive", EMC's marketing term for Single Layer Cell (SLC) NAND Flash non-volatile solid-state storage devices. Both IBM and EMC have been selling solid-state storage for quite some time now, but EMC felt that a new term was required to distinguish the SLC NAND Flash devices sold in their disk systems from solid-state devices sold in laptops or blade servers. The rest of the industry, including IBM, continues to use the term SSD to refer to these same SLC NAND Flash devices that EMC is referring to.)

Although STEC asserts that IBM is using the latest ZeusIOPS drives, IBM is only offering the 73GB and 146GB STEC drives (EMC is shipping the latest ZeusIOPS drives in 200GB and 400GB capacities for DMX4 and V-Max, affording customers a lower $/GB, higher density and lower power/footprint per usable GB.)

Here is where I enjoy the subtleties between marketing and engineering. Does the above seem like he is saying EMC is using newer or different drives? What are typical readers expected to infer from the statement above?

That there are four different drives from STEC, in four different capacities. In the HDD world, drives of different capacities are often different, and larger capacities are often newer than those of smaller capacities.

That the 200GB and 400GB are the latest drives, and that 73GB and 146GB drives are not the latest.

That STEC press release is making false or misleading claims.

Uncontested, some readers might infer the above and come to the wrong conclusions. I made an effort to set the record straight. I'll summarize with a simple table:

Raw capacity

128 GB

256 GB

512 GB

Usable (conservative format)

73 GB

146 GB

300 GB

Usable (aggressive format)

100 GB

200 GB

400 GB

So, we all agree now that the 256GB drives that are formatted as 146GB or 200GB are in fact the same drives, that IBM and EMC both sell the latest drives offered by STEC, and that the STEC press release was in fact correct in its claims.

I also wanted to emphasize that IBM chose the more conservative format on purpose. BarryB [did the math himself] and proved my key points:

Under some write-intensive workloads, an aggressive format may not last the full five years. (But don't worry, BarryB assures us that EMC monitors these drives and replaces them when they fail within the five years under their warranty program.)

Conservative formats with double the spare capacity happen to have roughly double the life expectancy.

I agree with BarryB that an aggressive format can offer a lower $/GB than the conservative format. Cost-conscious consumers often look for less-expensive alternatives, and are often willing to accept less-reliable or shorter life expectancy as a trade-off. However, "cost-conscious" is not the typical EMC targeted customer, who often pay a premiumfor the EMC label. To compensate, EMC offers RAID-6 and RAID-10 configurations to provide added protection. With a conservative format, RAID-5 provides sufficient protection.

In an ideal world, you the consumer would know exactly how many IOPS your application will generate over the next five years, exactly how much capacity you will require, be offered all three drives in either format to choose from, and make a smart business decision. Nothing, however, is ever this simple in IT.

Recently, IBM and the University of Texas Medical Branch (UTMB) [launched an effort] using IBM's World Community Grid "virtual supercomputer" to allow laboratory tests on drug candidates for drug-resistant influenza strains and new strains, such as H1N1 (aka "swineflu"), in less than a month.

Researchers at the University of Texas Medical Branch will use [World Community Grid] to identify the chemical compounds most likely to stop the spread of the influenza viruses and begin testing these under laboratory conditions. The computational work adds up to thousands of years of computer time which will be compressed into just months using World Community Grid. As many as 10 percent of the drug candidates identified by calculations on World Community Grid are likely to show antiviral activity in the laboratory and move to further testing.

According to the researchers, without access to World Community Grid's virtual super computing power, the search for drug candidates would take a prohibitive amount of time and laboratory testing.

This reminded me of an 18-minute video of Larry Brilliant at the 2006 Technology, Entertainment and Design [TED] conference. Back in 2006, Larry predicted a pandemic in the next three years, and here it is 2009 and we have the H1N1 virus.

His argument was to have "early detection" and "early response" to contain worldwide diseases like this.

A few months after Larry's "call to action" in 2006, IBM and over twenty major worldwide public health institutions, including the World Health Organization [WHO] and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention [CDC], [announced the Global Pandemic Initiative], a collaborative effort to help stem the spread of infectious diseases.

One might think that with our proximity to Mexico that the first cases would have been the border states, such as Arizona, but instead there were cases as far away as New York and Florida. The NYT explains in an article [Predicting Flu With the Aid of (George) Washington] that two rival universities, Northwestern University and Indiana University, both predicted that there would be about 2500 cases in the United States, based on air traffic control flight patterns, and the tracking data from a Web site called ["Where's George"] which tracks the movement of US dollar bills stamped with the Web site URL.

The estimates were fairly close. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention [H1N1 Flu virus tracking page], there are currently 3009 cases of H1N1 in 45 states, as of this writing.

This is just another example on how an information infrastructure, used properly to provide insight, make predictions, and analyze potential cures, can help the world be a smarter planet. Fortunately, IBM is leading the way.

My post last week [Solid State Disk on DS8000 Disk Systems] kicked up some dust in the comment section.Fellow blogger BarryB (a member of the elite [Anti-Social Media gang from EMC]) tried to imply that 200GB solid state disk (SSD) drives were different or better than the 146GB drives used in IBM System Storage DS8000 disk systems. I pointed out that they are the actual same physical drive, just formatted differently.

To explain the difference, I will first have to go back to regular spinning Hard Disk Drives (HDD). There are variances in manufacturing, so how do you make sure that a spinning disk has AT LEAST the amount of space you are selling it as? The solution is to include extra. This is the same way that rice, flour, and a variety of other commodities are sold. Legally, if it says you are buying a pound or kilo of flour, then it must be AT LEAST that much to be legal labeling. Including some extra is a safe way to comply with the law. In the case of disk capacity, having some spare capacity and the means to use it follows the same general concept.

(Disk capacity is measured in multiples of 1000, in this case a Gigabyte (GB) = 1,000,000,000 bytes, not to be confused with [Gibibyte (GiB)] = 1,073,741,824 bytes, based on multiples of 1024.)

Let's say a manufacturer plans to sell 146GB HDD. We know that in some cases there might be bad sectors on the disk that won't accept written data on day 1, and there are other marginally-bad sectors that might fail to accept written data a few years later, after wear and tear. A manufacturer might design a 156GB drive with 10GB of spare capacity and format this with a defective-sector table that redirects reads/writes of known bad sectors to good ones. When a bad sector is discovered, it is added to the table, and a new sector is assigned out of the spare capacity.Over time, the amount of space that a drive can store diminishes year after year, and once it drops below its rated capacity, it fails to meet its legal requirements. Based on averages of manufacturing runs and material variances, these could then be sold as 146GB drives, with a life expectancy of 3-5 years.

With Solid State Disk, the technology requires a lot of tricks and techniques to stay above the rated capacity. For example, you can format a 256GB drive as a conservative 146GB usable, with an additional 110GB (75 percent) spare capacity to handle all of the wear-leveling. You could lose up to 22GB of cells per year, and still have the rated capacity for the full five-year life expectancy.

Alternatively, you could take a more aggressive format, say 200GB usable, with only 56GB (28 percent) of spare capacity. If you lost 22GB of cells per year, then sometime during the third year, hopefully under warranty, your vendor could replace the drive with a fresh new one, and it should last the rest of the five year time frame. The failed drive, having 190GB or so usable capacity, could then be re-issued legally as a refurbished 146GB drive to someone else.

The wear and tear on SSD happens mostly during erase-write cycles, so for read-intensive workloads, such as boot disks for operating system images, the aggressive 200GB format might be fine, and might last the full five years.For traditional business applications (70 percent read, 30 percent write) or more write-intensive workloads, IBM feels the more conservative 146GB format is a safer bet.

This should be of no surprise to anyone. When it comes to the safety, security and integrity of our client's data, IBM has always emphasized the conservative approach.[Read More]

(Note: IBM [Guidelines] prevent me from picking blogfights, so this post is only to set the record straight on some misunderstandings, point to some positive press about IBM's leadership in this area, and for me to provide a different point of view.)

First, let's set the record straight on a few things. The [RedPaper is still in draft form] under review, and so some information has not yet been updated to reflect the current situation.

You can have 16 or 32 SSD per DA pair. However, you can only have a maximum of 128 SSD drives total in any DS8100 or DS8300. In the case of the IBM DS8300 with 8 DA pairs, it makes more senseto spread the SSD out across all 8 pairs, and perhaps this is what confused BarryB.

Yes, you can order an all-SSD model of the IBM DS8000 disk system. I don't see anywhere in the RedPaper that suggests otherwise, and I have confirmed with our offering manager that this is the case.

The 73GB and 146GB are freshly manufactured from STEC. The 146GB drive and 200GB drives are actually the same drive but just formatted differently. The 200GB format does not offer as much spare capacity for wear-leveling, and are therefore intended only for read-intensive workloads. (Perhaps EMC wants you to find this out the hard way so that you replace them more often???) These reduced-spare-capacity formats may not be appropriate with some write-intensive workloads. Don't let anyone from EMC try to misrepresent the 73GB or 146GB drives from STEC as older, obsolete, collecting dust in a warehouse, or otherwise no longer manufactured by STEC.

You can relocate data from HDD to SSD using "Data Set FlashCopy", a feature that does not involve host-based copy services, does not consume any MIPS on your System z mainframe, and is performed inside the DS8000 disk system. You can also use host-based copy services as well, but it is not the only way.

You can use any supported level of z/OS with SSD in the IBM DS8000. There is ENHANCED support mentioned in the RedPaper that you get only with z/OS 1.8 and above, allowing you to create automation policies that place data sets onto SSD or non-SSD storage pools. This synergy makes SSD with IBM DS8000 superior to the initial offerings that EMC had offered without this OS support.

I find it amusing that BarryB's basic argument is that IBM's initial release of SSD disk on DS8000 is less than what the potential architecture could be extended to support much more. Actually, if you look at EMC's November release of Atmos, as well as their most recent announcement of V-Max, they basically say the same thing "Stay Tuned, this is just our initial release, with various restrictions and limitations, but more will follow." Architecturally, IBM DS8000 could support a mix of SSD and non-SSD on the same DA pairs, could support RAID6 and RAID10 as well, and could support larger capacity drives or use higher-capacity read-intensive formats. These could all be done via RPQ if needed, or in a follow-on release.

BarryB's second argument is that IBM is somehow "throwing cold water" on SSD technology. That somehow IBM is trying to discourage people from using SSD by offering disk systems with this technology. IBM offered SSD storage on BladeCenter servers LONG BEFORE any EMC disk system offering, and IBM continues to innovate in ways that allow the best business value of this new technology. Take for example this 24-page IBM Technical Brief:[IBM System z® and System Storage DS8000:Accelerating the SAP® Deposits Management Workload With Solid State Drives]. It is full of example configurations that show that SSD on IBM DS8000 can help in practical business applications. IBM takes a solution view, and worked with DB2, DFSMS, z/OS, High Performance FICON (zHPF), and down the stack to optimize performance to provide real business value innovation. Thanks to this synergy,IBM can provide 90 percent of the performance improvement with only 10 percent of the SSD disk capacity as EMC offerings. Now that's innovative!

The price and performance differences between FC and SATA (what EMC was mostly used to) is only 30-50 percent. But the price and performance differences between SSD and HDD is more than an order of magnitude in some cases 10-30x, similar to the differences between HDD and tape. Of course, if you want hybrid solutions that take best advantage of SSD+HDD, it makes more sense to go to IBM, the leading storage vendor that has been doing HDD+Tape hybrid solutions for the past 30 years. IBM understands this better, and has more experience dealing with these orders of magnitude than EMC.

But don't just take my word for it. Here is an excerpt from Jim Handy, from [Objective Analysis] market research firm, in a recent Weekly Review from [Pund-IT] (Volume 5, Issue 23--May 6, 2009):

"What about IBM? One thing that we are finding is that IBM really “Gets It” in the area offlash in the data center. Readers of the Pund-IT Review will not only recall that IBM Researchpushed its SSD-based “Quicksilver” storage system to one million IOPS using Fusion-ioflash-based storage, but they also may have noticed that the recent MySQL and mem-cachedappliances recently introduced by Schooner Information Technology are both flash-enableddevices introduced in partnership with IBM. Ironically, while other OEMs are takingthe cautious approach of introducing a standard SSD option to their systems first, IBM appearsto have been working on several approaches simultaneously to bring flash to thedata center not only in SSDs, but in innovative ways as well."

As for why STEC put out a press release on their own this week without a corresponding IBM press release, I can only say that IBM already announced all of this support back in February, and I blogged about it in my post [Dynamic Infrastructure - Disk Announcements 1Q09]. This is not the first time one of IBM's suppliers has tried to drum up business in this manner. Intel often funds promotions for IBM System x servers (the leading Intel-based servers in the industry) to help drive more business for their Xeon processor.

So, BarryB, perhaps its time for you to take out your green pen and work up another one of your all-too-common retraction and corrections.[Read More]

Wrapping up this week's theme on Cloud Computing, I finish with an IBM announcement for two new products to help clients build private cloud environments from their existing Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) deployments.

IBM WebSphere CloudBurst Appliance -- a new hardware appliance that provides access to software virtual images and patterns that can be used as is or easily customized, and then securely deployed, managed and maintained in a private cloud.

IBM WebSphere Application Server Hypervisor Edition -- a version of IBM WebSphere Application Server software optimized to run in a virtualized hardware server environments such as VMware, and comes preloaded in WebSphere Cloudburst.

With more than 7,000 customer implementations worldwide, IBM is the SOA market leader. Of course, both of these products above can be used with IBM System Storage solutions, including Cloud-Optimized Storage offerings like Grid Medical Archive Solution (GMAS), Grid Access Manager software, Scale-Out File Services (SoFS), and the IBM XIV disk system.

IBM is part of the "Cloud Computing 5" major vendors pushing the envelope (the other four are Google, Microsoft, Amazon and Yahoo). In fact, IBM has a number of initiatives that allow customers to leverage IBM software in a cloud. IBM is working in collaboration with Amazon Web Services (AWS), a subsidiary of Amazon.com, Inc. to make IBM software available in the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2). WebSphere sMash, Informix Dynamic Server, DB2, and WebSphere Portal with Lotus Web Content Management Standard Edition are available today through a "pay as you go" model for both development and production instances. In addition to those products, IBM is also announcing the availability of IBM Mashup Center and Lotus Forms Turbo for development and test use in Amazon EC2, and intends to add WebSphere Application Server and WebSphere eXtreme Scale to these offerings.

For more about IBM's leadership in Cloud Computing, see the IBM [Press Release].